It may have taken its own sweet time getting here, but Ultra HD Blu-ray has finally arrived. And actually, contrary to the predictions of the usual physical media doom merchants it’s doing rather well, racking up sales considerably superior to those the old Blu-ray format managed in the early stages of its life.

I’ve already looked in depth at a few individual stand-out titles (The Revenant, Deadpool and the two most recent Star Trek movies), and I’ll be continuing to cover high-profile releases on an in-depth basis as and when they appear. I’ll also, though, be keeping wider tabs on the development of Ultra HD Blu-ray via sporadic round ups of multiple titles, kicking off here with mini reviews of The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road, Kingsman, Amazing Spider-Man 2 and Sicario.

The Martian sits squarely in the ‘hit’ half of director Ridley Scott’s uniquely extreme hit and miss career. Economical story telling, a great central performance from Matt Damon and stylish but never showy direction from Scott add up to a strange but winning combination of wit, intelligence, sudden drama and near-future sci-fi.

While the film impresses, though, the quality of the Ultra HD Blu-ray transfer isn’t quite the poster child for the format we might have hoped for.

The Martian UHD BD cover. (Pic: 20th Century Fox)

Detailing, for instance, often feels only slightly superior to the ordinary Blu-ray release - a result that’s surely at least partly down to the fact that the UHD Blu-ray transfer was created by upscaling a mere 2K digital intermediate master.

To be fair, some interior sequences and close-ups can enjoy a quite noticeable step up in sharpness, but the very fact that these moments stand out so much simply highlights how small the detail boost is for most of the film’s running time.

Some sharply contrasting edges in the image occasionally look artificially sharpened too, while shots containing a lot of motion show minor signs of blurring.

The Martian’s approach to the high dynamic range (
HDR) technology available with Ultra HD Blu-ray (and which I explain in jargon-free terms here) also feels quite subdued compared with some of the other Ultra HD Blu-ray releases seen to date. One or two contrast-rich interior sequences show off the benefits of HDR’s extra luminance range; small light peaks like the sun reflecting on space suits and helmets look more natural and pronounced; and the orange look to the red planet’s surface looks slightly bolder.

Oddly, though, the UHD BD’s exterior shots on
Mars feel less natural to me than they do on the ordinary Blu-ray. Though obviously it’s only fair to say that I don’t exactly have first-hand experience of what the surface of Mars actually looks like…

One final point to make about The Martian’s picture quality is that even on the best televisions it occasionally exhibits signs of striping over the most subtle color blends.

The Martian’s default DTS Master HD 7.1 soundtrack is in many ways strong. It’s exceptionally effective - and at times quite imaginative - at constantly creating the sense of you being within a three-dimensional environment, regardless of whether you’re watching an interior or exterior shot. It also opens up beautifully in terms of scale and effects precision for the film’s action scenes.

The only disappointment is that the standard release of The Martian reviewed here doesn’t feature a Dolby Atmos track. If you want that you’ll need to cough up a few dollars more for the recently launched extended UHD BD version of The Martian.

The original UHD BD of The Martian isn’t particularly exciting where special features are concerned, featuring essentially just a few featurettes, a gag reel and a production art gallery. Again, you get far more extra features - including a commentary track - on the recently released Extended Edition.

Verdict: The original release of The Martian reviewed here is pretty disappointing overall. Its visuals only sporadically deliver on UHD BD’s potential, while its sound and features have both been bettered by a more recent ‘Extended Edition’ which actually makes you feel a bit annoyed that this original effort was ever released.

Mad Max: Fury Road

Warner Bros

Price at the time of writing: $30

The Ultra HD Blu-ray transfer of George Miller’s gleefully bonkers resurrection of the Mad Max franchise is almost as chaotic as the movie itself.

On the picture quality front, there’s a lack of consistency in the visual quality that’s as bizarre as it can be frustrating. For instance, while the film’s interiors - including some shots inside the film’s countless cars - sometimes enjoy more detail and sharpness than they do on the Blu-ray of the same film, large-scale exteriors not only don’t look significantly sharper than they do on the standard Blu-ray version but on occasion actually look softer!

Mad Max: Fury Road UHD BD. (Pic: Warner Bros)

At the same time, some shots show signs of artificial sharpening, and there’s also a pretty bewildering mix of footage that looks polished and smooth and footage that looks grainy and noisy.

The mish mash of picture characteristics on show throughout the film is potent enough to actually become quite a distraction at times, and creates a feeling that the picture has been on the receiving end of some sort of unhelpful video processing. With this in mind it’s no great shock to find that the UHD BD release has been created by upscaling a 2K original digital intermediate. That said, I’ve already seen plenty of other 2K upscales that look far less patchy than this Mad Max release.

Inconsistency is also the order of the day where Mad Max’s HDR/wide color gamut features are concerned. While the extra luminance adds punch and shadow detail to the film’s interiors and night-time sequences and also makes the desert exteriors look markedly more lifelike, the luminance expansion occasionally feels too forced with the brightest exterior shots. And while the transfer’s wider color gamut is generally positive in adding a greater sense of solidity and dynamism to the film’s frantic world, some of the most potent colour effects - such as the flames that jet out of, well, almost everything - look too strident, standing out so much from the rest of the image that they become distracting.

The Mad Max: Fury Road UHD BD is on more consistently exciting ground with its Dolby Atmos sound track. In fact, given the almost relentless action of the film it’s hard to think of another Atmos soundtrack that’s so consistently aggressive in its use of spot effects, transitions, swirls, height effects, bass oomph and mid-range ‘swells’.

Extra features for this release are reserved for the accompanying Blu-ray, and comprise the same solid rather than inspiring set of ‘making of’ featurettes found with the original Blu-ray launch.

Kingsman’s heady combination of anarchic British humor with imaginative, stylishly directed action and an unexpectedly sophisticated plot adds up to one of the flat-out most entertaining films in recent years. So it’s nice to find it benefiting from a mostly superior Ultra HD Blu-ray release.

Kingsman: The Secret Service UHD BD. (Pic: 20th Century Fox)

The biggest surprise is how much cleaner and more detailed the UHD BD picture looks versus the standard Blu-ray. So far as I can tell the UHD BD transfer is an upscale from a 2K digital intermediate, yet its images look cleaner and more defined and textured without looking processed or forced.

Interiors such as the tailor’s shop look more lived in and thus more real, while exterior shots and large-scale interiors enjoy a more emphatic sense of scale as the extra crispness resolves the picture further into the distance.

The impressive sharpness on show can at times draw attention to a slight lack of focus in the image’s top and bottom sections caused by the film’s cinematographic process. But this isn’t really something you can fairly call a UHD BD flaw.

An extra sense of sharpness and detail is just the start of the UHD BD transfer’s attractions, too. Kingsman is an unusually bright and colorful film (especially when those heads start exploding…), and having both a wider color gamut and an expanded luminance range to work with on the UHD BD adds even more sparkle to the film’s engaging exuberance.

Just occasionally particularly action-packed sequences like the epic church fight can look a little soft over areas of movement, but overall the Kingsman UHD BD shows that while upscaling 2K sources is never ideal, it can yield enjoyable and worthwhile results.

Kingsman’s verve and energy is impressively extended into the UHD BD’s DTS HD Master 7.1 audio track, which fizzes, bangs, and explodes all around your speaker system with delirious abandon. It is a little disappointing, though, that you don’t get the Dolby Atmos mix the film enjoyed for its cinematic release.

The UHD BD sadly doesn’t introduce any new extra features beyond those you got with the film’s original standard Blu-ray release - though at least that fair to middling set of featurettes and galleries remains intact on the Blu-ray disc you’re provided with alongside the UHD BD one.

Verdict: Although it’s a shame it doesn’t get an Atmos audio mix, the Kingsman UHD BD is a treat for the eye that proves that 2K digital masters can be turned into good - if not outstanding - UHD BDs.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 differs from many of the UHD BDs coming out now in that its UHD BD video master is created from a 4K ‘scan’ of an original 35mm film print - an approach which yields some interesting and, in many ways, very impressive results.

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 UHD BD. (Pic: Sony)

Detail levels, for instance, are for the most part really quite gorgeous, delivering some of the most crisp and textured pictures of any Ultra HD Blu-ray to date. Some of the film’s ‘vista’ shots across New York contains so much detail you feel like just pausing the shot so you can take it all in at your leisure.

Sony’s approach to creating its 4K master also captures the natural grain associated with physical film. This might not be to everyone’s taste, I guess, but I found it gave the Amazing Spider-Man 2 UHD transfer a really cinematic feel you just don’t get with the standard Blu-ray version.

The UHD BD version of Amazing Spider-Man 2 also makes very satisfying use of HDR and wide color technology. Expanding the luminance range used in the mastering process opens the whole look of the film up beautifully, making bright scenes look more like real life while dark scenes enjoy more dynamic peaks, richer blacks and more shadow detail. Spidey’s suit looks more richly saturated and subtly nuanced too, and contrast- and color-rich sequences like the Times Square fight enjoy much more ‘pop’ on the UHD BD than they do on the normal Blu-ray.

Crucially, though, all of these HDR advantages are delivered with impressive sensitivity, ensuring nothing ever looks forced or unbalanced.

Sony’s sterling video efforts with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 are backed up by a Dolby Atmos soundtrack that injects a huge amount of dynamism and power into the film’s action scenes while never forgetting to contextualize the action in the bustling cityscape around it. The Atmos addition of a degree of verticality to the mix is particularly welcome given Spidey’s fondness for swinging through town on a thread of web.

Extra features on the UHD BD don’t expand on the solid selection offered on the original Blu-ray release, but it’s nice to find the commentary track being placed on the UHD BD disc rather than you having to switch to the standard BD that ships with the Ultra HD BD if you want to listen to the commentary.

Verdict: Sony’s unusual approach to creating the Amazing Spider-Man 2 UHD BD shows just how effective all the extra resolution, brightness and color available with the new disc format can be at recreating a cinematic experience at home.

Sicario

Lionsgate

Price at time of writing: $28

As well as being a gripping and gritty film, director Denis Villeneuve’s brooding thriller enjoys an outstanding Ultra HD Blu-ray transfer that really shows off what the format is capable of.

The film was shot digitally using a 3.4k resolution, before being turned into a 4K ‘digital intermediate’ for cinematic distribution. While this means it doesn’t deliver absolutely native 4K through every stage of its creation, it gets closer than most of the current movies getting the Ultra HD Blu-ray treatment. And the benefits of this are plain to see.

The Sicario UHD BD. (Pic: Lionsgate)

This is especially true when it comes to detail, as the entire film benefits from a level of clarity and detail that leaves the HD Blu-ray - and the majority of 2K upscale Ultra HD BDs - looking soft and low on depth by comparison. Being shot digitally at near-4K also means the UHD BD transfer enjoys a pretty much flawless finish devoid of grain or noise. As with the The Revenant, this pristine finish greatly enhances the intensity of your connection with what you’re watching.

Sicario’s extensive use of natural light sources and extreme environments benefits greatly from the addition of HDR to the video toolbox, adding more richness, detail and solidity to dark scenes while making the film’s often bleak exteriors look even more intense and strangely oppressive.

Sicario uses a deliberately bleached out look which perhaps isn’t best suited to showing off what UHD BD’s wider color spectrum can deliver. Actually, though, extra subtleties in the rendering of even this washed out palette are clearly apparent, and play their part in the dazzling clarity mentioned earlier.

There does for some reason seem to be a bit more judder during horizontal camera pans than I’ve seen on most other UHD BDs, but otherwise Sicario is a stellar visual experience.

Joining the top-drawer visuals is a Dolby Atmos audio mix that while not as consistently dramatic as some does a pretty brilliant job of underpinning the film’s potent atmosphere, especially in its use of Johann Johannsson’s fantastic score, and ramps up its intensity very effectively during the film’s most tense moments.

If the Sicario UHD BD package has a weakness it’s extra features. There are none on the UHD Blu-ray disc, while the accompanying Blu-ray only carries a small selection of fairly short ‘making of’ featurettes.

Verdict:Sicario may not be the most high profile film on the current UHD BD list but it’s certainly one of the best when it comes to showing off the format’s potential.